Those looking for a new five-bay NAS would do well to check out Synology’s newest DiskStation, the DS1019+. This new NAS replaces the DS1517+, and offers five bays as well as a quad-core CPU and 8GB 4GB of memory as standard. It also includes dual M.2 slots for super-fast SSD access, and supports up to a healthy 108TB volume from within the single unit.

The only notable feature this DS1019+ doesn’t offer is 10GbE Ethernet, and it unfortunately doesn’t seem like this NAS would be able to upgrade to it later. For those using mostly hard drives in this NAS, that won’t matter a great deal, but the NVMe SSDs are certainly going to be capped behind a 1Gbps connection. Those SSDs would still tremendously help with smaller files due to extremely low latencies, though.

At the front, the DS1019+ has a USB 3.0 port and a power button. At the back, there’s a dual-LAN (one can be used for rollover), as well as both an eSATA and another USB 3.0 port. The M.2 drives would slide in underneath the unit. To keep beefy hard drives cool, the unit features two big fans, which is really nice to see as someone who has his 8TB drives heat up quite significantly in a single-fan unit.

For business users, this NAS fortunately supports AES-NI, so encryption can be safely used without causing a detrimental impact to performance. The CPU itself is an Intel Celeron quad-core, and at 1.5GHz base, it’s not exactly a screamer, but for dedicated storage and streaming needs, it’s more than enough. The same can be said about 8GB of memory – single super-large volumes will be no problem. And speaking of volumes, Synology supports Btrfs, ext3/4, FAT, NTFS, HFS+, as well as exFAT (though an app is needed to access it).

One of the highlights of any Synology NAS is its genuinely good DiskStation Manager operating system – DSM for short. This OS remains the best for NAS devices that I’ve personally used, especially where setting up your own cloud shares are concerned. For business and home users, robust backup tools are included, supporting not just local backups, but remote, as well. Apps in the store will help increase the usefulness, especially for business environments, which could make use of Synology’s Calendar and Chat apps.

Pricing on the DS1019+ hasn’t been revealed, but Synology says the unit should be hitting retail soon. Once we have that information, we’ll update this post.

Feb 19 Addendum: Synology is pricing the DS1019+ at $649 USD, which includes the preinstalled 8GB of memory.

Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.